


In All Forms

by experimental (ladycyon)



Category: Devil May Cry
Genre: Angst, Devil May Cry 5 (Game), Gen, Introspection, Pre-Devil May Cry 5, found family trope ahoy!
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-11-17
Updated: 2019-11-24
Packaged: 2021-02-08 06:15:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,037
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21471388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ladycyon/pseuds/experimental
Summary: And wretched V is - naked and on his back, with trembling neonate limbs and ragged, heaving breaths that still hurt as he chokes on desperate, staccato gasps. Breathing is best done unconsciously, but he has yet to learn that lesson. He will, but instead--Instead he first learns a lesson of pain. It assaults him on every level as he is born and then immediately lives an entire lifetime in the span of moments. His mind fills with memories that are both his own and not. His body is a mortal thing containing the impossible and threatening to burst apart as it fills with the last remnants of Virgil’s forsaken humanity.V is born in sin, born of sin - if that is what makes one human. Then he is the embodiment of it.--"I will tell you the story of my birth."
Comments: 7
Kudos: 34





	1. May 1

His birth is a riot of violence - the result of a man literally tearing himself to pieces. And he? He is everything that man has deemed unworthy and fit to be discarded. He, the husk of Virgil’s humanity, carved away and left to fend for himself. 

Being born  _ hurts_. Like nothing else ever has. Because he has never experienced anything at all before this instant. He is a newborn and the world is a cacophony of new and competing sensations, none of which he has names for. The shock of it leaves him insensate. He knows why infants cry when they are born.

He  _ knows…. _ things - though he cannot say how or make sense of what he knows. Its too much all at once and he can’t process anything when breathing is agony. His tremulous lungs are shuddering through their first ever breaths. His brand new body is in full revolt and already threatening to decay. He could crumble apart and a good deal of him wishes to do just that.

But there is another part that rages -yes, rages - against it; some instinctual imperative common to all life. No matter how faint, how weak, no matter how wretched. All life clings to existence.

And wretched V is - naked and on his back, with trembling neonate limbs and ragged, heaving breaths that  _ still hurt  _ as he chokes on desperate, staccato gasps. Breathing is best done unconsciously, but he has yet to learn that lesson. He will, but instead--

Instead he first learns a lesson of pain. It assaults him on every level as he is born and then immediately lives an entire lifetime in the span of moments. His mind fills with memories that are both his own and not. His body is a mortal thing containing the impossible and threatening to burst apart as it fills with the last remnants of Virgil’s forsaken humanity. 

V is born in sin, born  _ of _ sin - if that is what makes one human. Then he is the embodiment of it. 

Unlike most humans, however, he is not given a lifetime to adjust. He is slammed into it, a brick wall of being alive, face first. He knows what he has done as Virgil and this pains him too. His fledgling heart, beats hard and painful against his ribcage, new and guilty - oh  _ so  _ guilty -in his chest. V the human, sentenced to bear the burden of Virgil’s guilt and loss and pain and weakness alike - all that tied his demon half to mortality and morality and all he was willing to discard in pursuit of power.

Everything Virgil didn’t care to be, V is and he must suffer knowing everything Virgil knows. He must endure, like all life must. Whatever it can. However it can. For as long as it can. 

And there is so much of it to be endured. Knowledge crawls across his skin like fire, it tunnels holes in his brain - these, his first sensations. He is awash with unadulterated fear.. Lying there prone, he is helpless. His humanity cocoons him and as it closes in, V feels could die from it.  _ Surely  _ he will die from it.

But he doesn’t die.

Perhaps it is the inexorability of life itself - the inevitable drive inherent in every spark of being, the primordial will to  _ survive _ that supersedes all circumstances. V was - is -  _ something new _ . And now he is  _ someone. _ Not just Virgil anymore; V finds, curiously, that he has a consciousness all his own.

V does not know  _ what _ he is anymore. It makes his head spin, the implications. It is a herculean effort just to drag himself back from the urge to disintegrate forever. But life is a clawing, grasping thing and Virgil has left him without an ounce of pride. That he kept all for himself.

So V crawls, both mentally and physically, until his day-old fawn’s legs stop shaking enough for him to take his first teetering steps, clumsy and disoriented, but tenacious. 

_ “And you, my father, there on the sad height, _

_ Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. _

_ Do not go gentle into that good night. _

_ Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” _

The words come to him like a halcyon breeze, a soft but joyous whisper of memory - one that is his own, and yet somehow  _ not _ (and  _ that  _ is a curious thing, how can he be both Virgil and himself?) - and those words? They are a promise. That humanity is as jubilant as it is sorrowful; that as much as he is burdened with Virgil’s pain and his guilt, he also possesses his multitudes - his softness, his yearning, his kindness - all that which rages against the dying of the light and makes his heart pump the blood through his veins.

Isn’t that what he is, in essence? A light, a memory, a  _ soul _ \- one which mulishly refuses to be extinguished. V, who had to be hacked off his host like a parasite. And still he refuses to die. He is ineffable and obstinate and still, somehow, clinging to existence. 

  
  


He latches onto it, that thing which bonds all. Life, determined and defying all odds. Inevitably, inexorably, he finds a way. He finds hope and will and drive as all life is wont to do. It makes worms crawl in the dirt and fish push water through their gills and hatchlings hammer at the insides of the eggs to break free from their shells. It makes deer kick and struggle even when the wolf’s jaws are on its throat and it makes plants push their roots into the soil and turn their leaves to the sun. Life clings. Life strives.

It makes V straighten his spine and take another step. He, too, is alive. Clinging. Striving.

He is weak and he is naked and he is alone, staggering along and reeling with excruciating mortality - the agony of which he has no bar to measure against - everything too much and too new, too tender and stinging bright but...but he is  _ alive.  _

He can feel his toes against the carpet and the aching of his knees; now, the wall against his hand, the soft ripples of decrepit wallpaper beginning to come unglued, his weight shifting to lean against it for support when his legs threaten to buckle. He can feel his hair tickling his ear and the sharp pain of breathing in his ribcage, still stabbing against his lungs. 

He laughs, sudden and stark. He is alone with the noise in the empty room. The sound scrapes against the inside of his parched throat and it’s foreign to his ears. It is not the voice he expects to hear. Not VIrgil’s. No. This voice is his own. This body is not Virgil’s either. That too, is his own. 

He has not asked for this life. He probably would not have chosen it, given the opportunity; but it is his now. 

V will do with it what he can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alright, I don't even go here. This isn't my fandom, I just got sideswiped by the V train and this is highly experimental so I really need feedback on this one if there's any hope for me to continue. That said, I *could* continue this. V is my accidental love and I've spent the last week consuming everything that exists and woefully, there is not enough for me. So here I am with a humble offering and perhaps I am willing to offer more. Assuming you haven't reached this point and found you want to throw a shoe at me. In which case, I would still appreciate the feedback.


	2. May 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They, who are like him. Cast-off remnants, who cannot possibly survive alone. They need him too.

_ “A dog starved at his master's gate  
Predicts the ruin of the state.” _

It is better now that he is not alone, though they are all of them starving. His familiars come to him hard fought, but the struggle is a toll worth paying. One by one they sink into his skin. Their contracts write themselves on his flesh, searing, binding, holding it more tightly together than he can on his own, painting over the cracks, occupying the empty parts of V - all the _ almosts _ and _ not quites _. 

V is still new and raw and fragile. And he _ needs _ them. He needs them - not just for their demonic energy which helps to hold his crumbling body together like patchwork, but for the space they fill inside of him, the way their presence chases away the cowering desperation of solitude. One multitude of V is a quailing child that is looking at the enormity of a world far too big for him.With a knowledge far greater than the space he occupies, V knows, _ knows down in the hollow ache of his bones _ , his task too great and he _ wilts _ in the face of its magnitude. Too big, certainly, for one (barely) human. A soft, mortal human. 

All the knowledge he could want! V knows exactly how to save the world. And the knowledge is nothing. Useless. V has no power to call his own. Bound in weak flesh, he struggles to keep himself upright. Who could he save? He cannot stop anything. Not alone. Not the way he is. 

And so he needs them. 

They, who are like him. Cast-off remnants, who cannot possibly survive alone. They need him too.

And so they come to him. In dreams. In the night. Revealing themselves to him - Virgil’s nightmares - all of them terrors, these woebegone demons, needy and querulous alike. They come to him as they are - for they, too, are alive now and they too can only _ be _ . They answer the demands of life to _ persist, _crawling through bad dreams to reach V, to grasp at a chance to prolong itself. Clinging. Striving. However it must, life finds a way. 

In need, they find him.

\--

Griffon has all the grace of a temper tantrum. He is the tortured prisoner laughing while his teeth get knocked out, spitting blood and bursting with hubris just waiting to be crushed. Strong, bold, capable, and unafraid. Just waiting for his opening. Griffon is a sarcastic barb - all feathers and murderous talons and a beak like razor wire, but when he is tame, he settles like a cloak across V’s skin and V comes to know his true essence. Griffon is a fortified wall built to protect something soft and vulnerable. Griffon is a protector and Griffon’s contract feels like warmth and V finds the cold doesn’t hurt so much after that. Griffon helps him find the cane, and with it, his own form of strength. Each of them pathetic in their own way, but together, alive. 

And when his thoughts get fuzzy and loud enough to make him drift away like an unanchored ship, lost on a sea of memories he’s still not sure are his own, Griffon’s voice hauls him back to port, sets him back on keel, keeps him afloat.

\--

Shadow comes to him as a yowling beast with a thorn in her paw. She is the breaking point of rage where form and intent collide. She is the imagined revenge made real, the sharp fantasy of justice, the frenzy of a pain that can no longer be borne without struggle. And she is the struggle. She is the inky nightmare in which she manifests, stalking him as is the nature of her form. Like him, like Griffon, so too was she somehow now alive and somehow _ more. _More than just the castoff trauma that created her, more than her namesake, more than a wisp of a bad dream. She will not dissolve when he wakes.

She is. Another spark of being, another tendril of consciousness, of _ life _. In this instance, not clinging, but clawing and slashing. She, a quarrelsome devil, balking against the inevitable, the inoraxable - her need, and his. V seizes her paw and ignores her bellicose clamour, her snarling, fanged fury. Instead of removing the thorn, V pushes it in, deep and then deeper, burying it entirely into the meat of her paw. 

She howls. She spits. She hisses, showing him her teeth, her claws - all the ways she could flay him alive, and he too weak to stop it, even with Griffon holding his hide together. And then Shadow _ submits _, red eyes staring deep into his, offering him her deference. V smiles, still pushing the thorn into her paw. 

Shadow cringes, instinct imploring her to eviscerate him, but now unable to defy her master. If he wills it, she will obey, even if she does not understand. For him, she suffers the thorn; until she becomes the thorn. And then she, the thorn, burrows into him, and it is V’s turn to submit to her. Shadow’s contract is a single nail hammered straight into the center of V’s heart, and though it now beats painfully around the thorn that is Shadow, his heart somehow feels stronger after that. 

\--

And Nightmare? _ Ohhh _ Nightmare... seeps in. Nightmare is viscid tar in V’s lungs, is engine oil quaggulating his blood - black and liquid and _ thick. _Nightmare seeps in through all V’s multitudes of cracks - unstoppable, inevitable, inexorable as life itself and the rest of it. Nightmare pours itself around V.

And V? He is the first man, experiencing the first darkness, the first drowning, the first death. The light _ expires, _ the light _ never was, _just as V never really was. V experiences death the same way he lived Virgil’s life - in an instant, all of it at once. Such is his first meeting with Nightmare: it comes as the quaking in V’s muscles, the pins and needles in the marrow of his bones, the rushing of his blood, the quickening of his breath.

Nightmare is the fear and the end of fear. V lies in the shadows of an alley - clothed now, at least - and fights - _ rages - _against the paralytic effects of Virgil’s deepest horrors brought to life. The battle between them is all silence and stillness as Nightmare holds V’s body asleep while his mind is awake, trapped, and screaming. V fights. For control, for the ability to twitch a single muscle, to move even one finger. If he can break the spell, he can master the Nightmare, he can end his fear. But the grip it has on V is suffocating. He feels himself sinking into the pit, into sleep and fear from which he would never wake. 

V feels his breath stutter and slow, drowning as Nightmare seeps and seeps and _ seeps _; fills V with a thousand, a million horrors and just as many reasons to scream and wish for death. And yet…. Life still clings. Still strives. If only to move a single finger--

Somehow, V does. His thumb, folding inward, just a twitch. That twitch, the mastery of his own body, his own fear, his own Nightmare. A twitch. Followed by a full bodied jerk as V wrenches free from the Nightmare’s hold on him and shudders as it retracts its inky blackness from his lungs and V can _ breathe _ again. Even as Nightmare drips down over him like rainwater, coating his hair, soaking into his skin with the others. Nightmare’s contract is written in cement that fortifies V’s bones, helps him stand taller, even as it coats him in darkness.

_ “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.”_

V witnesses his first sunrise and it looks like hellfire and bedlam - an omen to sailors and civilians alike - _ red sky at morning. _

But V is unafraid. V has tamed his nightmares and they rest now within him. Slumbering beasts, they make him strong. He has lasted through another night and a crimson sky cannot frighten him, when life and hope are so fresh on his tongue.

  
  


And so, all of them together then. They find a way to survive. However they can. For as long as they can.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This, I suppose, is a complete thought. Though it is a part of a larger story in my mind. I'm just not sure.


	3. May 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there’s one thing V knows, it’s that nothing will motivate Dante like a good old fashioned sibling rivalry. 
> 
> Is Dante his brother? V isn’t sure.

V is getting used to his new body. His screaming nerves gentle into more nuanced sensations. He knows he is still dying, but the shock of it wears off. A person can get used to anything. 

With his familiars filling in the cracks, he feels more put together. Breathing is easier. Walking too.

By the time he enters the Devil May Cry headquarters, the utilities are working and V's stride does not belie that he has only learned to walk in the last two days. He slinks in like a predator, leads with humor, speaks in riddles - seeking all the ways he knows to intrigue and disarm the man before him. 

Dante reacts to him like a total stranger, but V knows him all too well. After turning the lights back on, it’s only too easy to talk Dante into the job V has for him - the job he cannot accomplish himself. He doubts Dante can it accomplish it either but it is important they try. Dante struggles right along with the rest of them, though he wears it differently - surrounded by molding pizza boxes and abject squalor, in the dark, without plumbing more often than not. Job to job. Paycheck to paycheck.

Dante...scrapes by. 

But a living is a living is a living. And who’s to say who’s way is right? Sloths and turtles survive just as well as hawks and antelope. Laziness is a survival strategy of its own. Dante has become a master, doing only as much as he had to.  


If there’s one thing V knows, it’s that nothing will motivate Dante like a good old fashioned sibling rivalry. 

Is Dante  _ his _ brother? V isn’t sure. But there’s an unmistakable  _ ache _ of emotion that wells in his throat when he tries to speak the demon’s true name. Is it also his own name? For a moment, V chokes on it.

He’s here to beg Dante for help. Sure, Dante danced to the tune of cold hard cash for just about anyone, but this? It’s personal. On so many levels V can’t even begin to explain.

V is begging Dante to correct a wrong he is responsible for, one that is literally tearing his  _ oh so  _ human soul into pieces. V’s humble desperation in the face of this apocalyptic fuck up has brought him here, pleading to lay his baggage at Dante’s feet. He  _ needs _ Dante. 

_ _ He thinks maybe he hates this man.   


He’s never experienced hatred before, so he isn’t sure. But there’s an intense roil of something dark and hot moving through him, the urge to attack Dante with his bare hands, rather than beg on bended knee. The submission rankles something within him and he wants claws - not hands - and a mouthful of fangs.

And yet, curiously - so curiously! Life was s _ o marvelously _ bizarre and in two days V has not ceased in his wonder at it - there is a pang of something even deeper. Another  _ need _ that slithers up from the depths, something older than the simmering lava of abhorrence in his belly. Maybe not hate after all; maybe something more layered, maybe a bitter medicine.

Deeper down there were roots, tangling together, binding them at their genesis. Admiration and affection, camaraderie, feelings of  _ warmth _ , of connection. V looks at Dante and wants to bridge an aching divide, bury a hatchet that isn’t quite his to bury; if only to feel that sensation of  _ settling _ , of  _ home, _ and  _ comfort _ . Human needs. Things V wants desperately; things Virgil wanted first. 

V cannot say if their wants, their  _ needs _ are one and the same, but their roots are all tangled together, indistinguishable.

When V invokes the name, Dante is motivated, as V predicted. But he is also suspicious. His eyes cut through V like a knife. He is certainly not the first mysterious stranger Dante has encountered, but V has knowledge far beyond what any mere human should. Dante is the only one who might notice how disturbingly  _ intimate _ his knowledge happens to be. Dante looks at V like _don't I know you?_  


For a moment, V is afraid. He is certain Dante sees right through him; recognizes him, no matter the face he wears. V is  _ not _ Virgil - at least, not anymore. But will Dante see any difference if he learns the truth? 

It is a fleeting fear. One Dante himself quashes by asking, “Hungry? You like pizza?” He has apparently decided that - knowledge or no knowledge - V doesn’t pose much of a threat and, truthfully, he isn’t wrong about that. Dante never  _ was _ one to get too bogged down in the details - especially not on someone else’s dime. A chance to rekindle an old grudge (and a few paid utility bills) seems to be enough for him. 

V has never tasted pizza before, but he has come to know the bite of hunger. He knows already that humans can waste away for the want of more than just food. They are aching and hollow and needy. Mortal beings all; grasping blindly for something to cling to, something to nourish and feed them.

V looks at Dante and tilts his head. V  _ knows _ him, as Virgil knows him. But V sees him with a stranger’s eyes too. And Virgil doesn’t know Dante nearly as well as he thinks he does. Virgil sees Dante as one thing, but he failed to recognize the same thing which he failed to recognize in himself - the part of him that he cast out. The part of him that has become V.

What Virgil fails to understand about all of humanity is this: it isn’t just weakness and doubt. 

Dante, like V, like every human, contains multitudes.

V sees Dante for all the things Virgil cannot. He is curious to know the man as he is, not as Virgil see him, not drowning in the potent cocktail of competing emotions Virgil has towards the man. Virgil’s anger burns V’s tongue, but it is V that swallows it back. 

It is  _ V’s _ throat aching with it - the deep down crescendo of human need unfulfilled, such heedless yearning that V almost,  _ almost _ reaches out to touch Dante. Just to feel connected to something.

With great restraint, because there are greater needs than his own - something  _ else _ V understands that Virgil never could - he keeps his hands to himself.

It has been a long day. V has traveled a great distance and even with the borrowed strength and aid of his familiars, his body is an ailing thing that tires easily and requires frequent rest. The pizza is greasy and  _ good  _ and it sits heavy in his belly and V finds himself sort of melting into the couch. Dante is arguing amicably with someone over the telephone and the background noise is pleasant to him. The couch is lumpy, but it is the closest thing to a real bed V has ever had.

He does not remember falling asleep, but he wakes an indeterminate time later and cannot remember what he dreamed of. His heart pounds with it, whatever it was. His chest aches, a crushing emptiness that he fears - is inexplicably and utterly  _ terrified -  _ might never be satisfied. 

_ Holes _ . 

He remembers he dreamed of holes. Expanding underneath him as he tried to cross a desert. 

Shadow is there, nudging his side, purring loudly in his ear. V shakes himself from the sudden feeling of falling, the dizzy upside-down vertigo of hurtling through empty space. He is still on the couch, on solid ground. Shadow is beside him, one of her paws now heavy on his chest and a little bit of the rawness edges back. V’s center doesn’t feel quite so vacant; he doesn’t feel quite so much like the earth is collapsing out from under him.

The lights are off, but there’s the dim glow of a television coming from an open doorway on the second floor. V notices there is a blanket draped over him and knows only Dante could have done this. He tries to hold onto that. Tries grasping at the strange feeling of  _ settling _ and  _ home _ contained within that gesture. Pretends it’s more than Dante’s inherent friendly nature that he tries to disguise. 

Or maybe this was the real Dante that Virgil never saw. It wasn’t so much that he disguised it as it was that Virgil never cared to know. He showed it freely to V - a stranger.  _ Not Virgil. _

V turns it over in his mind. Virgil. Not Virgil. Two competing versions of Dante, both incomplete, as V is incomplete. His fingers worry at the edge of the blanket. It is soft and warm. It is the first blanket V has ever touched and Dante has given it to him. A stranger. Let him crash and took the time to make sure V would be warm while he slept. Covered him with a blanket. Such a  _ human _ thing to do.

  
V wonders what the word  _ family  _ means to Dante.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a loose plot in mind, but this is mostly just going wherever this takes me at this point. Sorry for any stylistic inconsistencies I'm a flake and an utterly moody writer. Thank you for your lovely comments and all the kudos, they're extremely encouraging. <3


End file.
